Helping Your Child With English

At Bishop Ellis Catholic Primary School, children receive a daily English lesson and additional spelling or phonics lessons 3-5 times a week, depending on their age and personal requirements. They will also spend varying amounts of time each week reading a range of different texts, either in small groups or independently.  The staff follow the National Curriculum which outlines what is expected for children from year 1 to year 6. The foundation stage uses the EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage) to support them with their planning.

We have produced a grammar glossary  that can be used at home to help support your child. With the introduction of the new National Curriculum, grammar has become very high profile and the children are expected to learn and use a wide variety of technical grammatical terms that parents and carers may be unaware of.   We have also produced a resource that gives some suggestions for helping your child to learn their spellings – not all of these ideas will be useful for every word they are learning, but your child would benefit from having a wide range of strategies to draw upon.  Finally, reading at home is extremely important and we recommend that all children spend some time each day reading for pleasure outside of school and discussing the books they read.  The final resource contains some questions that could be asked to help guide these discussions.  The question ideas are aimed particularly at key stage one children, but can easily be adapted for older children as well.

We hope that these ideas and resources might be of some use to you in supporting your child at home.